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The Raleigh Historic Development Commission is hosting an awareness and fundraising event at 7 p.m. Dec. 8 to try to preserve a local Lustron house.(Photo by Sally Keeney)

By Andrea Weigl

The Raleigh Historic Development Commission is hosting an event at 7 p.m. Dec. 8 to try to preserve a local Lustron house.

The event includes a screening of the film, “Lustron: The House America’s Been Waiting For,” followed by a panel discussion. Among the speakers: George Smart of NC Modernist Houses, Lustron homeowner Deborah Chay, and Virginia Faust, a realtor and Lustron specialist. The moderator will be Dan Becker. READ MORE…

A promotional photo showing a Lustron home living room. Courtesy of KDN Films

By Chris Cioffi

Tom Morris was a teenager when his family’s new home rolled up on the back of a tractor-trailer in thousands of pieces ready for assembly.

The Lustron home arrived from Columbus, Ohio, one of fewer than 2,500 prefabricated steel houses built between 1948 and 1950 as affordable housing for soldiers returning from World War II. It was put together on a nearly 12-acre parcel at 3612 Buffaloe Road in Raleigh and became a cozy if odd-looking home to the Morris family.

“Best I can remember, it took them about three weeks for them to assemble it,” said Morris, 82, a retired physician who lives in Durham.

Now the Raleigh Historic Development Commission is raising money to save the house from demolition. READ MORE…

The Dwell Home goes up for auction in Chatham County on Tuesday. AuctionFirst Inc.

BY RICHARD STRADLING

PITTSBORO — When it was completed in 2004, the Dwell Home, which goes up for auction in Chatham County on Tuesday, was an early, high-profile example of a modern-design house made from components built in a factory.

It was also an opportunity for the home’s owner, Nathan Wieler, to get into real estate development and to begin selling similarly prefabricated modern homes. After a decade that included the real estate bust of the Great Recession, Wieler’s ventures have had mixed results; only one of three subdivisions he launched in Chatham County came to fruition.

But Wieler still believes in the promise of prefabrication to bring homes designed by architects to a wider audience, and he continues to offer them for sale on the internet, where there’s now a crowded market for modern prefabricated homes. READ MORE…

Among the seven jurors, representing internationally known architects, critics, and designers, is Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger. From 1997 through 2011, Goldberger was The New Yorker’s architecture critic. Today he is Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, for whom he weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Cherry-Gordon house in Raleigh’s historic Oakwood neighborhood. In the article “Is This House Too Modern To Exist?” he praised the Cherry-Gordon house and called NCMH “a wonderful preservation organization.” READ MORE…

The storied Modernist-style house that was co-commissioned by the editors of Dwell Magazine and an early dot-com entrepreneur in 2004 on a rural, wooded road outside of Pittsboro is being put up for auction to the highest bidder.

The so-called “Dwell House” located off of Hanks Chapel Road in eastern Chatham County was a bit of a novelty when it was built, primarily because its design was the result of a contest among architecture firms nationally and the fact that each of its modules were prefabricated – a construction method that is still a bit of a novelty for high-end homes more than a decade later.

North Carolina Modernist Houses is offering a tour from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Oct. 29 of what is known as the “Dwell House” in Pittsboro. Courtesy of NC Modernist Houses.

By Andrea Weigl, Oct. 5, 2016

…North Carolina Modernist Houses is offering a tour from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Oct. 29 of what is known as the “Dwell House” in Pittsboro.

The house is slated to be auctioned off in November, like James Taylor’s childhood home was auctioned this summer. N.C. Modernist Houses organized tours of the James Taylor house as a fundraiser before the auction; it was so successful that they are doing that again with this house, which has been described as “the most high-profile modern prefab house in America.”

Dwell is an American magazine devoted to modern architecture and design. In 2003, the magazine’s editors partnered with the original homeowners to initiate the Dwell Home Design Invitational, a 21st century version of the Case Study Houses program. The designs submitted had to be pre-fabricated with sections no wider than 16 feet so that they could be moved by truck to the site on the top of a small mountain in Pittsboro.

Tickets for the tour are $10. Entrance is on a timed basis. Tickets are available at ncmodernist.org/pittsboro.htm. Participants will take a free shuttle to and from the house.

First Prize, Jury Awards, and Second Place in the People’s Choice category: 123 Hillcrest by Alphin Design Build. Photo by James West / JWest Productions LLC

BY ANDREA WEIGL

On Thursday, N.C. Modernist Houses announced the winners of its annual statewide modernist residential design contest.

The big winner of the 2016 George Matsumoto Prize contest is Will Alphin of Alphin Design Build. Alphin took home the first-place prize in the juried competition for a four-level house in Raleigh’s Cameron Park neighborhood. That house, 123 Hillcrest, a 6,200-square-foot house valued at about $1.6 million, also won second place in the people’s choice category. Alphin received $3,000 in prize money.

Following close behind were designers with the in situ studio in Raleigh, whose designs placed second and third in the juried competition.